In pursuing a career in optical lithography, I’ve learned a lot about optics. When I graduated from college as an engineer I had the typical scant background in imaging, and I found the topic of partial coherence particularly opaque. Yes, all of the equations were in Born and Wolf, but that doesn’t mean I could understand them. That’s when I first discovered Doug Goodman, then working at IBM. He had developed a 2D optical imaging simulator and his papers on partial coherence approached the topic in a novel and enlightening way. I still had to read several other treatments before the ideas finally sunk in, but I instantly recognized that Doug Goodman had a unique way of explaining things. Taking a short course from him in the late 1980s cemented this opinion. When I needed to understand the impact of illumination aberrations on imaging about a decade later, I again turned to Doug’s papers to teach me.

I liked Doug because he was wicked smart, but also because he was quirky, with an odd and irreverent sense of humor that I always appreciated. He worked at IBM during the golden years of applied research, and was one of the extremely talented group of scientists and engineers working in lithography that so impressed me about IBM.

Doug loved to explain things on many different levels, especially using demonstrations. His classic 1995 paper “Optics demonstrations with an overhead projector” became a short course and then a book. Long after the tech world embraced Powerpoint and LCD projectors, Doug still gave talks with an overhead projector and hand-written transparencies, very much in a classic professorial style. The last paper I saw him give was at an SPIE lithography conference in 2004. The organizers had to dig up an overhead projector just for him. The topic was how to explain partial coherence. His talk included the use of a pyrex pan full of water.

Doug left IBM to work for Polaroid in 1993, and I saw him less frequently as he strayed from my field of lithography. I was glad to see him come back to lithography when he became a senior scientist at Corning Tropel in 2002. By then, the advance of his Parkinson’s disease was plain to see. He retired in 2007 and died on May 14, 2012 at the age of 65. Too young. He is missed.

Some links to obituaries for Doug:
http://spie.org/x87302.xml
http://www.osa.org/About_Osa/Newsroom/Obituaries/Goodman-Douglas.aspx
http://www.optics.arizona.edu/News/2012Newsletters/2012goodman-douglas-s.htm
http://hosting-25262.tributes.com/show/Douglas-S.-Goodman-93849644